Against “Guilty Pleasure”

Earlier this year, a New York Times Magazine profile of the showrunner Shonda Rhimes (“Scandal,” “Grey’s Anatomy”) included a line that made me think she was even more than the talented and savvy TV writer she’s already shown herself to be: “Rhimes observes that people, even the ones who like ‘Scandal,’ describe it as ‘ridiculous,’ which she can live with, or a ‘guilty pleasure,’ which she ardently despises.” I despise it, too. If there’s a contemporary idiom that puzzles and irritates me in equal measure, “guilty pleasure” is it. I object to neither the pleasure, nor the guilt; it’s the modifying of one by the other that works my nerves, the awkward attempt to elevate as well as denigrate the object to which the phrase is typically assigned.

Guilty pleasures refer to cultural artifacts with mass appeal—genre novels, catchy pop songs, domestic action movies (foreign action “films,” no matter how awful, tend to get a pass), TV shows other than “Breaking Bad” and “The Wire”—that bring with them an easy enjoyment without any pretense to edification. What’s even more perverse is that these so-called “guilty pleasures” never involve actual transgression: the bland escapades of Bridget Jones are a guilty pleasure; the depraved orgies of the Marquis de Sade are not.

Before the term became a pop-cultural epithet, the moralism made more sense. For Aristotle, the pleasure associated with honorable action was virtue, whereas the pleasure associated with “evil action” was vice—a genuine mix of guilt and pleasure by another name. Aristotle and Plato believed that the higher orders of pleasure entailed an expenditure of intellectual effort. Kant took the idea further in his “Critique of Judgment,” distinguishing between “the agreeable,” “the beautiful,” and “the good.” One is pleased by the beautiful; the good is held in the highest esteem, whereas the agreeable merely gratifies. A guilty pleasure ever since has contained this element of gratification—of a need that’s met, almost despite oneself, rather than a pleasure one freely chooses. The mind that chooses is disembodied, abstract, and therefore pure; the body that needs is demanding, material, and messy—in other words, not to be trusted. When “guilty pleasure” first appeared in the New York Times, in 1860, it was used to describe a brothel.

The term appeared only a handful of times in the paper of record until the late nineteen-nineties, when it started coming up in its contemporary incarnation again and again, at the tail end of the culture wars. (According to the online Times archives, “guilty pleasure” shows up approximately a twelve hundred and sixty times—twelve hundred and forty-seven of those since 1996.) In some ways, the timing seems strange; the guilty pleasure was becoming a part of the cultural vocabulary right around the time cultural distinctions were ceasing to matter. But maybe it was precisely because those distinctions were becoming moot that people felt emboldened to use it. The guilty pleasure could then function as a signalling mechanism, an indicator that one takes pleasure in something but knows (the knowingness is key) that one really shouldn’t. Once distinctions were blurred, you could announce a love for pop culture that, in an earlier era, you would have been too ashamed to admit.

Laura Frost, a professor of literary studies at the New School, told me she had entertained using “Guilty Pleasure” as a title for her recent book, “The Problem of Pleasure,” which is about the troubled relationship between pleasure and Modernism, but she found that it didn’t quite capture what she had found in her research. “Guilty pleasure was not something that came up much,” she said, especially during the interwar years. Modernists distinguished between pleasure that was too easy and the difficulties of real art, yet they were so invested in dismissing easy pleasure that they could feel righteous in their preferences. Frost says pleasure for the Modernists wasn’t so much guilty as “sneaky”: “They would bring it into their work, but it’s disavowed.” Aldous Huxley, for instance, expended several passages in “Brave New World” describing the dangerous sensuality of “the feelies” and the many zippers on a seductress’s white acetate sailor suit. “He can’t resist,” Frost said. “He knows that stuff is compelling and funny and titillating.”

As Frost sees it, postmodernism opened up the possibilities for pleasure by allowing us to “recognize that whole category of experience.” Modernism had been competing with popular culture and consequently built bulwarks against it, pushing back against anything that was accessible and easy to take in. Postmodernism doesn’t have the same hangups; in fact, it seems to have few hangups at all, which is perhaps what once got the moralistic culture warriors worked up into a panic in the first place.

In “The Closing of the American Mind,” Allan Bloom warned about the “thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV.” Bloom tells us that the pleasures this kid derives from his pop-cultural distractions are anything but innocent: “A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.” From “orgasmic rhythms” to “the killing of parents”! If this thirteen-year-old doesn’t feel guilty, he should.

“The Closing of the American Mind” was published in 1987, during the panicky time of backmasking and Satanic messages hidden in heavy-metal tracks. Bloom didn’t use the term “guilty pleasure,” though one imagines that if he had, he would have deployed it with unqualified opprobrium rather than with a nudge-nudge and a wink-wink (it’s hard to picture Bloom doing much of either). Perhaps the guilty pleasure as we know it today, with all of its nudging and winking about the old notions of cultural hierarchy, of obsessions between “high” and “low,” was made possible by old cultural warriors like Bloom and Bill Bennett; their language was so overwrought, so full of swivet and distress, that irony might have seemed the most sensible response. This possibility makes the term a little less intolerable to me—but barely.

I wondered whether the French, who are known for being invested as a culture in culture, had a comparable concept. Fabrice Robinet is a New York–based editor and translator who moved here from France six years ago to work as a literary scout. “When I interviewed with American editors and publishers,” he recalled, “that was a question I was frequently asked—‘What is your guilty pleasure?’ ” Robinet had to adjust his understanding of what that meant; the French have the term plaisir coupable, which generally pertains to the older, moralistic understanding of guilt and pleasure, and it is rarely used to refer to cultural consumption. The closest idiom they have is péché mignon, “tiny sin,” but that only really applies to food.

It’s not that the French don’t believe in cultural hierarchy, but they don’t make as many fine distinctions between various shades of acceptability. “Just to be called culture,” Robinet said about French expectations, “it has to be a little highbrow.” He added that Americans have a wider definition of what culture is. In France, the landscape is more stratified; there isn’t much in the middle. “The French don’t have the concepts of up-market fiction or middle-market fiction,” Robinet said, referring to common categories used by American publishers. “They have romans de gare, ‘train-station novels,’ which include everything that isn’t literary. And then they have literature.” Lines might be breaking down, as France struggles with the influx of pop culture, much of it American. But the guilty pleasure isn’t yet part of France’s cultural lexicon. As Robinet put it, “If you have a guilty pleasure, you don’t talk about it.”

Here, though, you make sure to talk about it—which is why the term exudes a false note, a mix of self-consciousness and self-congratulation. Aside from those actively seeking out public debasement, if you felt really, truly ashamed of it, you probably wouldn’t announce it to the world, would you? The guilt signals that you’re most comfortable in the élite precincts of high art, but you’re not so much of a snob that you can’t be at one with the people. So you confess your remorse whenever you deign to watch “Scandal,” implying that the rest of your time is spent reading Proust.

The guilty pleasure is a vestige of America’s disappearing middlebrow culture, of that anxious mediation between high and low, which at its best generated a desire to learn, to value cultural literacy and to accept some of the challenges it requires. General magazines once flourished because of it; even Ladies’ Home Journal, better known now as a chipper dispenser of service journalism and horoscopes, used to publish the likes of Edith Wharton and W. H. Auden. But the guilty pleasure seems to me the distillation of all the worst qualities of the middlebrow—the condescension of the highbrow without the expenditure of effort, along with mass culture’s pleasure-seeking without the unequivocal enjoyment. If you want to listen to Rihanna while reading the latest from Dean Koontz, just go ahead and do it. Don’t try to suggest you know better. Forget the pretense and get over yourself. You have nothing to lose but your guilt.

Jennifer Szalai is a New York–based writer and editor. Her last piece for Page-Turner was on Oprah’s Book Club.